Mit Researchers Put Thought Into Clothes

May 16, 1995|The New York Times

To some, the Internet is already old hat. But how about Bodynet, an enveloping computer web in which your wireless-data telephone might actually be a hat?

Or scarves and neckties with enough sensors and computer intelligence to warn you that the accompanying blouse or shirt is a dubious fashion choice? The Bodynet might also offer intelligent eyeglasses, which could sense what you were looking at and automatically adjust the focus.

Bodynet is just one of many blue-sky possibilities in Things That Think, a new project that researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab will be presenting today in Cambridge, Mass.

The presentation will be made to more than 150 companies - potential project sponsors, many of which are not usually synonymous with high-tech innovation, including Black & Decker, the jeweler Cartier International and Hershey Foods.

But this is new territory, too, for the Media Laboratory, MIT's research center. In the '80s, the Media Lab pushed the world toward a new idea - multimedia.

Now that multimedia has become common in video games, computer CD-ROMs, or in the sights and sounds of the Internet's World Wide Web, the Media Lab feels the need to get ahead of the digital curve once again.

Things That Think is dedicated to the idea of designing computer intelligence into everyday products. The premise: As computers get smaller, cheaper, more powerful and pervasive, society will move beyond the information era as defined by today's PC to an era in which virtually everything can be a truly personal computer.

Possibilities, researchers say, include shoes able to calculate the time it will take to walk to a given location, clothing that continuously relays a recovering patient's vital signs to a doctor's data base, or jewelry capable of sizing up the attributes of potential dates across the dance floor and even sending messages to the jewelry worn by the prospective partner.